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Unreading Election Law

The White House has mounted a campaign to defend the legality of the scheme by which President Clinton's 1996 election campaign financed over $40 million worth of television commercials largely with huge soft-money contributions from unions, corporations and wealthy donors not legal in Federal campaigns. Even the vaunted White House spin machine cannot erase the facts and the law.

In exchange for receiving $75 million in public financing, Mr. Clinton agreed to tight limits on fund-raising and spending for his campaign. The question is whether those restrictions mean anything. In a white paper prepared by a lawyer for the campaign, the White House essentially is arguing they do not.

The central thesis being advanced is that the ads fit into a definitional safe harbor created by a complex interaction of Federal law and rulings by courts and the Federal Election Commission. The television ads, the argument goes, were not really campaign ads but generic Democratic Party ''issue ads'' that the party ''coordinated'' with the Clinton campaign and financed with a combination of restricted hard money and unrestricted soft money under a formula set by the commission.

But the alleged coordination was a sham. In reality, the Clinton campaign controlled the funding, content and broadcasting of the ads. The party was merely a conduit for the money the President and his team solicited.

The White House contends the party's passivity does not matter, and that simply by labeling the ads as party issue ads and not urging people to vote for or against a candidate, the President and his handlers achieved a legal alchemy, transforming campaign ads into commercials that did not count against the Presidential spending limit.

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But the law is not as ignorant as that, or would not be under an Attorney General less pliant than Janet Reno. Both the statute establishing the Presidential public financing system and Election Commission regulations make clear that any expenditure in connection with a Presidential campaign made by or at the request of a candidate counts as a ''qualified campaign expense'' that comes within the law's restrictions.

Trevor Potter, a former Election Commission chairman, also points out that the White House misstates the current standard used by the commission to assess whether advertising bought by a party qualifies as ''issue advocacy'' to be financed by unlimited soft money. The test is not simply the omission of certain magic words like ''vote for,'' as the White House argues. The test is whether the ads contain an ''electioneering message,'' such as a picture of a Federal candidate, and are designed to help or hurt that candidate. The law leaves some room for parties to engage in coordinated campaign spending with candidates, but in 1996 that room was limited to a modest $12 million of hard money.

The wonder is not that the White House would try to defang the law it broke. The real wonder is Ms. Reno's refusal to investigate. But as our colleague William Safire pointed out yesterday, we live in a world in which Ms. Reno's investigators have yet to contact John Huang, the central figure in the White House's Asian money connection.